A 13 March 2017 article by Douglas McCormick at the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) web site reports on a 14 Oct 2016
paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America by Ruiz et.al. entitled "Entanglement of
quantum clocks through gravity".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Douglas McCormick, 13 March 2017, IEEE Spectrum
File this under “fun to think about”: Researchers at the University of Vienna have shown how ultraprecise measurements of time can bend the surrounding space and make time in the region run slower.
The basic theory is surprisingly simple, a combination of Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. In short, increasing the precision in the time measurement increases the uncertainty in the energy at that point. Since energy and mass are interchangeable, this is the same as creating a virtual mass. As the uncertainty in the time measurement falls, the “mass” increases. And as the mass increases, so does its gravity. The result is a regional gravitational time dilation—the effect that causes clocks on Earth to run slower than clocks on Global Positioning System satellites, for example.
To be sure, the effect cannot be produced or detected with today’s tools. In their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Vienna researchers—Esteban Castro Ruiz, Flaminia Giacomini, and Časlav Brukner of the university’s Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology—measure the time dilation effect in “decoherence time”: The greater the warping of space-time, the smaller the decoherence time.
Can Ultraprecise Time Measurements Warp Space?
